When it was announced that the Coen Brothers were remaking the film that garnered John Wayne his only Academy Award and the appreciation of even the most stout John Wayne haters, I was not surprised. Westerns are not unfamiliar territory for the brothers. While their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” is easily identifiable as a modern Western, some of their most popular films are what can be described as Neo-Westerns. Both “Raising Arizona” and “The Big Lebowski” are most definitely Westerns, just not in the traditional sense and both share some principal themes explored in “True Grit”; their first straight forward traditional Western. (more…)